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Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

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Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#521

Post by marginalia_nu »

A_Venom_Roll wrote: post #432
marginalia_nu wrote: post #354

I was annoyed by Wikipedia's noisy design choices, so I built a very scaled down read-friendly mirror of Wikipedia that presents the text as though it was a book, doing away with inline links. It's desktop-first as I don't really use mobile browsers, my fingers are too big. https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/article/Hacker_News

I like this. How does this work? Is there an api you use to obtain the text from the wiki articles?

It's a script that reads openzim files, and then cleans up the MediaWiki HTML into a sqlite database. The encyclopeida service then does some basic rendering to produce this website. Search and navigation is provided by tortured misuse of a PATRICIA Trie.

It's very much a one-off sort of a thing that's not super well documented, but here are the sources: https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/encyclopedia.marginalia....

It's a surprisingly light service. I used to host it on a raspberry pi 4 for a long while, and it wasn't significantly slower than it is today.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#522

Post by _kush »

mrjh wrote: post #235
_kush wrote: post #61

I've built a few apps which started out as tools for my own use and later polished + released for public. - Cone: This started out as a small tool to help me identify the name of the colors of objects around me (i am a red-green colorblind). Now it's a full fledged color picker app with a Pantone license - https://cone.app - CBVision: This is another small tool for colorblind people which shifts the problematic color…

Speaking as a fellow product designer... Stunning work. What an awesome portfolio!

Thanks a lot!

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#525

Post by d_philla »

https://postacard.co - I wanted a dead-simple way to create a postcard from a pic on my phone/device and then mail it, without a required login/subscription/ad-laden/SEO'd-to-death interface etc.

Had the idea while on a trip with friends last year in Mexico. The postcards we sent were a huge hit with our boomer parents.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#526

Post by chankstein38 »

I mostly make small stuff for myself or to explore an idea or topic. Most recently I made a small CLI python app that moves my mouse to a specific area using cosine interpolation. The reason being I hate the youtube homepage's mouse-over autoplay "feature" and I found a spot on the homepage that will allow me to scroll through videos without having my mouse on a spot that will cause autoplay. So I made it so, if I'm moving my mouse, it just moves as I tell it. Once it's sitting, after a delay, it retracts the mouse like a pen at a bank. So I can explore as much as I want then, when I'm done exploring, it moves my mouse back! No more forgetting my mouse in a spot that causes autoplay.

It's small and simple but it makes my life better!

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#528

Post by tomjen3 »

akshayKMR wrote: post #507
punkspider wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really should finish my work instead of playing lalo.li/lsd

I don't get it. What are the controls? I'm using Firefox on desktop.

Its a mouse based game. You put down walls that the ball hits.

Object of the game is to get the ball into the box.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#529

Post by iansinnott »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #191
iansinnott wrote: post #146

I have something of an obsession with being able to search my digital history. To this end I've created a few projects which I still use almost daily: - full text tabs forever [1]: chrome extension to provide full text search over web pages I've visited - browser-gopher [2] (formerly browser parrot): collect browsing history from all browsers - prompta [3]: a ChatGPT UI with full text search and some other niceties […

> full text tabs forever [1]: chrome extension to provide full text search over web pages I've visited This is amazing . But wouldn't this extension end up taking up a massive amount of space? Does it index text which is fetched and hydrated after page load? Also, does it strip HTML from the text so that text like this can be searched with exact phrase matching? Is the source code for fttf available? I'm sure you're…

https://github.com/iansinnott/full-text-tabs-forever

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#530

Post by dirtybirdnj »

I've developed a GUI / workflow around converting bitmap images to vector traces. The first version was jquery and duct tape, the second version was react / material UI, the third version was a backend service and "forms" based application I made with the intent of hooking it up to another backend. I found other cool data sources to feed into plotters as well.

I have a half built CNC machine, currently stuck on replacing the mainboard because the first one I used died. I want to design a web UI around a pen plotter as a piece of artwork, not a slave to the "bored moms monetized cloud" like my Cricut is.

I took time off from this project because my career exploded. Things are finally getting a lot better. Looking forward to working on this again, experiences like this teach you how bad you really want it.

https://www.instagram.com/robotdrawsyou

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